The Black Sheep
In Constructing Normalcy by Lennard Davis, he sheds light on the fact that being considered normal is something that most people aim for in life because normalcy is equated with success. In our society, we have been conditioned to think that deviating from the norm is wrong and that we must always aim for what’s conventional. This ideology dates back many centuries and represents the outdated beliefs that a uniform society is a successful society. When it comes to the concept of beauty, it seems that no matter how much time passes, Eurocentric beauty standards are still efficacious in our modern-day society. From T.V shows featuring white protagonists to drug stores that only have one shelf in the hair section labeled “cultured”, the dominance of European features is quintessential in shaping what people’s perception of beauty should be. These unattainable beauty standards are typically the root of the insecurities of many young teens. In more drastic circumstances, the ideology of a certain race and their characteristics may cause an identity crisis in someone who doesn’t naturally have what they’ve been conditioned their entire lives to worship. This is seen in the recent Dr. Phil episode My Daughter is Racist Against Her Own Race, in which a young African American woman named Treasure, claims that she is white and bashes her own blackness and that of those around her. Throughout the entire episode, she worships her supposed “whiteness” and how it makes her superior to others, especially African Americans. In relation to Davis’ article, her mindset resembles how the celebration of moderation and middleness can have detrimental effects on people’s views of themselves. When it comes to Treasure, the social implications of beauty and superiority led her to believe that being white is what’s ideal and normal. So much so, that she completely dissociates herself from her blackness. This coincides with the main idea of Constructing Normalcy because the constant celebration of uniform characteristics leads to the inaccurate portrayal of anything other than what’s ideal, as abnormal. For centuries, society has painted a clear picture of what the average person should look like and therefore inhibited the appreciation of the uniqueness of every person.
One of the main points that Davis makes is that the hegemony of normalcy dominates peoples views of themselves and others. The concept of normalcy manifested in the mid-1800s and is derivative from the concept of the ideal. This comes from the consummate images of Venus gods which served as the earliest demonstrations of the exemplary body. “The notion of the ideal implies that… the human body visualized in art or imagination must be composed from the ideal parts of living models” (Davis, 10). In the Dr. Phil episode, Treasure mentions that she idolizes Kim Kardashian not only because she’s white, but because “she is so perfect, her body, her hair, everything.” This reinforces Davis’ claim because, in our present-day society, the perfectly airbrushed and photoshopped images we see online often lead us to aim for unattainable standards of beauty. Similar to the painting by Francois-Andre Vincent when he “lined up all the beautiful women of Crotona in order to select in each her ideal feature or body part and combine them into the ideal figure” (Davis, 10), these perfectly edited photos create a standard that people are incapable of reaching naturally. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian give young girls unrealistic expectations for what they should look like in order to be considered beautiful.
Treasure’s mother explains that when she was younger, she grew up with a white father and then when he died, she revealed to her daughter that her biological dad was actually African American. The life coach on the show said that this point was pivotal in her identity crisis because she grew up thinking that she was a part of a white culture and then all of a sudden that was taken away from her. People have this innate fear of deviating from the middle of the normalcy “bell curve” because they think that if they stray too far from middleness, they won’t be accepted or wanted in society. Being outcasted can result in the lack of access to important resources such and money and education. The early statisticians who curated the guidelines of normalcy all “had one thing in common: they were eugenists” (Davis, 14). By idealizing certain desirable characteristics and making others believe that that’s what makes people normal, it makes those who lack those traits feel inferior and shameful of their identity. Instead of wrestling with society’s problem of racial normalcy, Treasure fabricated an entirely new identity that favors what society considers to be beautiful. She says, “God created one perfect person and that person is me… my lips aren’t too big, I have straight hair, my ears are perfect.” Her description of who she thinks she is, describes what Davis mentions as the distribution of “racial supremacy” (Davis, 17). Throughout the years, European traits have been idolized because for a long time Europeans were viewed as racially superior. This superiority led to the inaccurate notion that European characteristics equal beauty and that beauty equals normalcy.
Dr. Phil does an experiment on Treasure where he takes her to two different parts of L.A to see how she reacts to the different environments. When she’s in Beverly Hills she seems visibly happy and says that this is where she belongs and sees herself living in the future. She says “I said hello to my fellow caucasian people, they were so beautiful and pretty I assumed they were models so I had to tell them they were beautiful.” This highlights Davis’ claim that the hegemony of normalcy in public situations “must always be creating and bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing, deconstructing images of normalcy and the abnormal” (Davis, 23). Being surrounded by an environment of primarily white people made Treasure feel like the black sheep. In order to gain acceptance, she felt she had to complement the “normal” people of that environment and gain their validation. On the other hand, when she’s taken to a more impoverished community she immediately says it reminds her of the “ghetto hood” and says “there are way too many African Americans… these people look like pick-pocketers… they’re more known to commit crimes than caucasian people.” We can relate this back to the idea of the “normal curve” because Davis states that “an important consequence of the idea of the norm is that it divides the total population into standard and nonstandard subpopulations” (Davis, 14). In this case, being surrounded by a dominance of people that didn’t have the characteristics of “normal” people, meant to Treasure that she was surrounded by people who were on the farther ends of the curve. She felt she had to find her way back to the middle by ridiculing them in order to feel like she was safe.
“The concept of a norm, unlike that of an ideal, implies that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm” (Davis, 13) and this generates a modern utopia of people who look the same. People who don’t follow the guidelines of normalcy are typically outcasted from society and seen as inferior. The idea of ranked power is the objective of the norm and is “supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance” (Davis, 17). Thus, the domination of what the human body should look like and the benefits that come from reaching those standards makes people fear the consequences that may come from not fitting the bill. In Treasure’s case, the underlying symbolism between race and normality brought out the principles of eugenics that many of us have been conditioned to follow. This made her dismantle who she was and neglect a crucial part of her identity. Upholding the normal standard led to her objectification of people like her because she longed to identify with the normativity of the central character in society. In order for equality to truly exist, we must promote making people feel comfortable in their own skin and dismantle the antiquated normalcy standards that have been followed religiously for way too many years.
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